On 21st July will be five years since my very first post here which seems quite amazing. I don't often celebrate blog birthdays, but I thought five years would be worth a special post.

So here's my plan: on the 21st July I will do a special Q&A post where I answer any questions you have. I'm thinking the questions would be more about the blogging side and my book, rather than specific scientific questions on bones, but if you have any good other questions I'll try to answer them as well.

This week's been very busy: today was my last day of the school year (in Scotland the summer break starts and ends about three weeks earlier than in England), I've been working on a lot of things behind the scenes, and tomorrow morning I'm off on Scout camp for five days. So today I'm going to do a follow-up post about some interesting bones.

Last week I wrote about exploring a wood I was last in a few years ago, and finding the partial remains of a roe deer while I was sheltering under a tree from the rain. The skeleton wasn't terribly interesting, except for the left tibia which was broken. In the end, I brought back both tibias, but when I started asking questions on Twitter from experts I realised there was probably enough to write an entire post about the injury.

I love exploring new woods. I have been to almost all of the woods near my house over the last four years, and know them pretty much like the back of my hand, so last weekend I decided to explore a wood that I have only been to once before. It's the wood which has the hidden disused watermill above the waterfall, and is close to the deserted castle.

There is only one track to the wood, and you need to drive there. After we parked the car, there was a short track which leads to the top of the south side of a big valley. There was once trees in the valley, but the ones on the south side were cut down when I was last here two years ago. At the bottom, a stream has been dammed to make a large pond, but is is very hard to see it from a distance because there are bushes all round the pond.

Tonight was the last episode of this year's BBC Springwatch. It was an amazing series, as they all are. If you live outside the UK, Springwatch/Autumnwatch/Winterwatch are a live TV series, three times a year broadcast from a nature reserve, featuring incredible filming about all the wildlife you can find here. You might remember I have been on BBC Autunmwatch before with Chris Packham and Winterwatch Unsprung earlier this year with Nick Baker. This year is it's tenth anniversary.

So if you're a parent, and your children has enjoyed Springwatch, and you want to find out more about wildlife, what can you do next ? Here are five simple ideas, based on things I have done and blogged about before. And as a kid, I can say that I enjoyed them all !

As you know, almost all my time this year has been spent in two woods on the moor near my village, looking for one very small animal: a pine marten ! I've been quite lucky with the filming, but while I've doing that I've been able to have a close look at the other wildlife that lives around there, like the birds, rabbits and roe deer.

Last weekend I was was away camping with the Scouts, but my dad took my two younger brothers up to move my trail camera which had been left for a week watching an owl perch at the very north end of the wood. He wasn't sure where to reposition the camera, so he walked with my brothers down the the south end of the wood. He couldn't think of anywhere to attach the camera, so he just went up to a random tree, but as he did, he noticed something beside a fallen tree branch that he thought was maybe a dead buzzard or owl.

About me

I'm Jake McGowan-Lowe and I am a bone collector, naturalist, blogger and author as seen on BBC's The One Show, Autumnwatch, Winterwatch, CBBC Wild, Newsround and BBC Breakfast.

I've appeared on the BBC alongside such experts as Sir David Attenborough, Chris Packham, Nick Baker and Ben Garrod. BBC Wildlife Magazine says I'm one of the 50 most influential conservationists in the UK, and The Courier ranked me as the 24th most influential person in 2015.

I am fourteen years old, and I live in a beautiful part of Scotland. I love walking, exploring, watching wildlife and collecting bones. I've been collecting bones since I was six, and I blogged here every week between July 2009 (when I was seven) until February 2016, when I took a break.

You can read more about why I began blogging here, and my advice to other kids wanting to blog here.

Jake's Bones: The book !

Like this blog ? Buy the book ! This blog and my collection led to a book deal for a brilliant childrens' book published by Hachette Children's. It's now been published in the UK, Ireland, the USA, Canada, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, the Netherlands (called Het Grote Bottenboek van Jake) and South Korea.

It was even shortlisted for the prestigious Royal Society 2015 Young Person's Book Prize !

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Me in the news

There have been stories about me in The Times, the Daily Telegraph Magazine, the Daily Mail, the Mail on Sunday,The Sun, Scotland on Sunday, the Sunday Mail, the Dundee Courier, the Perthshire Advertiser, the Stirling Observer, onBBC Radio Scotland, on the STV news, and I've even been on CBBC Wild, CBBC Newsround, The One Show, BBC Autumnwatchand Winterwatch !